Permanently Deleted
“The BLM movement represents social fascism as outlined by Stalin,” is hands down the worst take I’ve read on this website, and in and of itself demonstrates that you are literally incapable of applying Marxist analysis to a concrete social movement, an expression of rage and discontent shared by millions.
The protests this summer were largely spontaneous mass protests against police brutality and racism that involved tens of millions of working class people. Because it did not spontaneously generate flawless class consciousness among its participants, which is literally never something that happens with mass movements of any sort, you rush to categorize it as “social fascism.”
If mass movements spontaneously generated internationalist, Marxist perspectives, there would be no need for communists, as any effort would be redundant. But because that literally never happens, we use Marxism to analyze these movements, not for the purpose of categorization, which is what you’re doing, but for the purpose of comprehending and intervening in those movements to bring a Marxist perspective.
“an oppressed group seeking to enter the Labour Aristocracy”
That’s your explanation of the struggle against racism in the US? Lol.
Social fascism was a trash theory in the 20th century and is a dumpster fire of an approach when you retrofit it to “explain” a large protest movement against racism.
You’re honestly one of the least competent, “Marxists” I’ve ever come across.
Aight
Let’s see what a subreddit of actual well-read communists think on the US situation
https://old.reddit.com/r/EuropeanSocialists/comments/jmzsjm/on_the_us_elections/?sort=top
Versus someone that’s been suckered into trotskyism - an opportunist trend in Marxism that hasn’t produced a revolution in it’s entire existence
In case of reductionist to useless class analysis of Steel you are also right, however in the way you present the way I would disagree.
Capitalism will always lead to shitty situations in the US, the problem is not the disparity in wealth in the US, the problem is capitalism, which naturally has become global.
Steel’s position amounts to: Nothing in the US is good, since nothing in a core can be good, so no group that does anything there can be good and any group that is there is labour aristocracy which means that they can’t be good and do no good. Which is kind of a silly position, but it is fair to be a Third World Revolutionist. There is no law anymore against that.
In my opinion it is a bad take partially cause the US will have productive forces and wealth and power and all that including well established military that might side with the Counterrevolution and Reaction aka the Fascists when push comes to shove.
Bringing up the wealth disparities was more to point out that you have to ignore both class differentiation in the US and conditions as they actually exist to arrive at the conclusion that the entirety of the US working class are labor aristocrats, receiving some special privilege for cooperation with the bourgeoisie.
I get what you say, Steel’s term of “labor aristocracy” is separated from those facts, as he uses them in a reduced Leninist sense, so that there doesn’t have to be specific benefit as being part of the core is enough.
In terms of materialist analysis your point is in my opinion strong as it holds up that it can’t be enough for us to have a term from one interpretation of theoretical framework that categorial contains the group we talk about, but doesn’t allow us to differentiate farhter (if at all that is your goal).
I would like to add that labour aristocracy (“Arbeiter_innenaristokrat_innen”) is a term that has plenty of history. It got a tradition before Lenin’s Imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, it got a new finding of the term in it (which if you read it reduced, is every core worker benefits from imperialism - even in a sloppy reading as every single individual worker, instead of structurally by higher wages, hegemony etc.). After Lenin’s establishment of the term there was also an evolution of the term in parallel paths which are not integratable (one is the Stalinist tradition of it used internally in the Soviet Union).
The reading of the term here is in my opinion a sloppy populist variation of a mix of a close readin gof Lenin’s term with a lot of Stalinist sloppyness in it.
The other general thing I would like to add is that while I support longer analysis the transfer of theoretical frameworks to specific historical settings, events and groups is often not as easy as one thinks and without lot of data might lead to misunderstandings. In this situation the view of BLM is skewed since theoretical means are stretched beyond their usefulness and there is not even a goal to separate what exactly is going on.
